PSFK’s Future of Work report has highlighted the state-of-the-art lab that product design incubation company Quirky has created for their crowdsourced designers and engineers to develop, prototype, and test products. Quirky, which we have written about previously here and here, receives over 100 product ideas per year; submitted from their community of inventors and influencers. Once a product idea has been selected, the original inventor is able to join the Quirky team while they continue to collaborate virtually with the community in order to finetune a physical prototype.

The inventors, influencers and Quirky team members are able to quickly create new product iterations and test each change, eventually releasing a product with a vetted groundswell of support from their 300,000+ community of users. By the end of 2012, Quirky had paid out $2 million to their community, based on their 76 commercialized products, which are available in over 25,000 retail locations.

If you’re looking for more trends, innovative ideas or themes changing the Future of Work, check out our full report for sale here or join us for our Social Media Week discussion with leading experts and industry innovators on Feb 20th. More information here.

For more exclusive PSFK Labs’ ideas, watch the summary presentation and see everything that you’ve missed so far here. Feel free to join the conversation and share your ideas about the future of work with the #FoW hashtag on Twitter.